Trump Has Short Attention Span So He Isn’t a Genius

An attorney who oversaw Donald Trump’s income tax returns in the mid-1990s said the Republican presidential candidate had little interest in the tax code — conflicting with the billionaire’s claim that he understood taxes “better than anyone” who had run for the White House.

Patience

“As far as I know, and that only goes through late ’96, he didn’t understand the code,” said Jack Mitnick, a former tax adviser for Trump, in an interview with NBC’s TODAY. “Nor would he have had the time and the patience to learn the provisions. That’s a lifetime of experience.”

Huge loss

Mitnick oversaw Trump’s income tax returns in 1995, portions of which were published Saturday by the New York Times. The documents showed a reported loss of nearly $916 million — a deduction tax experts hired by the newspaper said was so large that Trump might have legally avoided paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

Fix tax code

Trump responded to the report on Twitter: “I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them” — a stance he has repeated on the campaign trail.

Art of the Deal

Tony Schwartz who really wrote The Art of the Deal is a liberal tortured now by thoughts that he helped launch Trump from New York tabloid fodder to national icon. The story he tells is consistent with many impressions of why Trump has been unable to gather the seriousness he needs to overcome forces involved in winning an election.

2 year old

Tony tells the story of not being able to get information for Trump for the book because Trump’s attention span lasted about 10 minutes. After that Trump’s mind would drift off to something else. “He had the attention span of a 2 year old.”

Experts

Experts believe that a normal attention span for adults is 15 to 20 minutes but tends to slow down again as we age. Scholars also blame the rise of technology and Internet based reading for a general decline.